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The Happiness Philosophers

Name: The Happiness Philosophers
Author: Bart Schultz

The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians

Bart Schultz

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The Happiness Philosophers

The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians

Bart Schultz

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About This Book

A colorful history of utilitarianism told through the lives and ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and its other founders In The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism—one of the most influential yet misunderstood and maligned philosophies of the past two centuries.Best known for arguing that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong, " utilitarianism was developed by the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin (the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley), Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Together, they had a profound influence on nineteenth-century reforms, in areas ranging from law, politics, and economics to morals, education, and women's rights. Their work transformed life in ways we take for granted today. Bentham even advocated the decriminalization of same-sex acts, decades before the cause was taken up by other activists. As Bertrand Russell wrote about Bentham in the late 1920s, "There can be no doubt that nine-tenths of the people living in England in the latter part of last century were happier than they would have been if he had never lived." Yet in part because of its misleading name and the caricatures popularized by figures as varied as Dickens, Marx, and Foucault, utilitarianism is sometimes still dismissed as cold, calculating, inhuman, and simplistic.By revealing the fascinating human sides of the remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, The Happiness Philosophers provides a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives—one that also helps explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and is again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems.

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Publisher

Princeton University Press

Year

2017

ISBN

9781400884957

Topic

Filosofia

Subtopic

Utilitarismo

CHAPTER ONE

The Adventures of
William Godwin

In April 1788, when he was thirty-two, William Godwin began a journal. He maintained it for the next forty-eight years, making his final entry on 26 March 1836, less than two weeks before his death at the age of eight-one. For most of those forty-eight years Godwin followed, so far as he could, the same daily routine: before breakfast he read from one of the Greek or Latin classics; in the morning he read and wrote; in the afternoons he became sociable and sought out one or more of his many London friends, with whom he enjoyed arguing, dining, and going to the theatre. His journal reflects this orderly life. Each of the thirty-two, soft-bound notebooks is of uniform size and shape; each one has been neatly divided into days and weeks in red ink. The entries themselves (in black ink) are brief and matter-of-fact. Godwin records what he has read, what he has written, and the people he has seen. Occasionally he is cryptic: he writes in Latin or French, or employs a form of personal code. The journal is at once highly informative and profoundly reticent.

—STEPHEN HEBRON AND ELIZABETH C. DENLINGER,
SHELLEY’S GHOST: RESHAPING THE IMAGE
OF A LITERARY FAMILY¹

Introduction and Early Life

What was Godwin reticent about in his journal? His life knew the extremes of fame and obscurity, but both poles could be problematic, and much of his inner life remains a mystery. What should not be mysterious, however, is the vital role that he played in the development of philosophical utilitarianism. Although Bentham is usually given star billing as the first great classical utilitarian, both utilitarians and their critics have on important counts drawn even more heavily from the works of Godwin. Godwin’s puzzle cases and illustrations are familiar to every student of ethics, even though he often does not receive the credit for them.

Thus an infamous moral dilemma often used to condemn utilitarianism goes as follows. Two people are trapped inside a burning building, a palace. One of them is a famous benefactor of humanity, the great Archbishop Fénelon. The other is an obscure individual of no repute, his chambermaid. Only one can be saved—who should it be?

Godwin harbored little doubt that it should be the Archbishop, a benefactor to thousands:

Supposing I had been myself the chambermaid. I ought to have chosen to die rather than that Fénelon should have died. The life of Fénelon was really preferable to that of the chambermaid. But understanding is the faculty that perceives the truth of this and similar propositions; and justice is the principle that regulates my conduct accordingly. It would have been just in the chambermaid to have preferred the archbishop to herself. To have done otherwise would have been a breach of justice.

Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. That would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fénelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid and justice—pure, unadulterated justice—would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fénelon at the expense of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth? My wife or my mother may be a fool or a prostitute, malicious, lying, or dishonest. If they be, of what consequence is it that they are mine?²

Critics have found this a monstrous extreme of impartiality, and its author a “monster ” or, in De Quincy’s words, a “ghoul, or bloodless vampire,” a case of waking reason producing nightmares.

Of course, Godwin was no friend of conventional marriage and family, even under normal, non-emergency circumstances, deeming the institution a most perversely unjust form of private property law and an obstacle to human happiness and free love. He would in due course come to be regarded as another terror produced by the French Revolution, but not before putting on the map an influential perfectionistic and anarchistic form of utilitarianism, and giving to the world his and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary, who would marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and write the horror classic Frankenstein. This was a family of both Reason and Romanticism, a family circle that would spin everything—from utilitarianism to anarchism to atheism to feminism to Gothic horror to children’s literature—into an endless fabric of treatises, novels, poems, stories, fables, letters, plays, syllabi, and manifestos. Godwin represented the shock of the new even to those identified with utilitarianism.

Recall that although British utilitarianism came to be identified as a largely secular philosophy, its first influential form was theological. William Paley (1743–1805) was an Anglican clergyman whose Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785)—a key text in the curriculum at Cambridge University—helped the utilitarian perspective achieve wide influence.³ On some counts, Paley was a reformer: he opposed slavery and the slave trade, and championed poor relief and progressive taxation. Still, he was always searching for the concordance of existing religious moral practices and institutions with the greatest happiness. Paley took moral obligation to mean being obliged (commanded or even threatened), and thus anticipated the later utilitarian reliance on external sanctions, rewards, and punishments. The difference was in his reliance on God’s commands, with the prospect of heaven or hell, rather than on the visible or invisible hands of social institutions. And for Paley, if the hand of God was invisible, God’s handiwork was nonetheless highly visible, not only in scripture, but also in the order of the natural world. In various theological works, he elaborated in classic fashion the argument from Design, which held that nature itself bespoke intelligent design, just as finding a watch in the wilderness would.

It was Paley’s fame that spurred both Jeremy Bentham and William Godwin to publicly defend a secular version of utilitarianism, taking the doctrine off its conventional religious foundations. Although Bentham’s seminal Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation appeared in 1789, its impact was slow at first, and very much in the shadow of Godwin’s colossally successful philosophical work of 1793, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, which was followed in 1794 by his colossally successful novel Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams. Thus, although Bentham was the slightly senior figure, it makes sense to begin the story of the great English utilitarians with Godwin, whose name was by far the greater in that formative era. This is, to be sure, a somewhat provocative move, but as will become clear, it is Godwin who better represents utilitarianism in all its tensions and complexities. As Peter Marshall, one of Godwin’s best biographers put it:

Because of his influence on British institutions Bentham has been remembered most, but Hazlitt was undoubtedly right when he observed that Godwin was ‘the first whole-length broacher of the doctrine of Utility’. [Francis Place, the radical tailor] moreover was in a good position to know that the abuse showered on Political Justice was ‘mainly caused by its propagating utilitarian doctrines’. It is Godwin’s transformation of Christian ethics into an original system of utilitarianism which earns him not only an important place in the history of ethics but makes him an innovating moralist highly relevant to the modern world.⁴

Born on March 3rd, 1756, at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, William Godwin was the son of a Dissenting Protestant minister—who was also the son of a Dissenting minister—who found it difficult to get along with or maintain his congregations. The Dissenters were Calvinists tolerated despite their rejection of the Church of England, though they were banned from the universities and from public office. They formed a permanent oppositional religious group, a mostly prosperous middle-class one, deeply committed to the right of private judgment. A dwindling congregation in Wisbech had the family soon moving to Debenham, in Suffolk, to a congregation that had run through seventeen ministers in sixteen years. Thanks to an Arian schism, Godwin senior’s tenure was also short, and in 1760 the family moved to Guestwick, near Norwich, where, thanks to the death of the paternal grandfather, they achieved a certain security. Still, as Mark Philp has noted:

Godwin’s upbringing was rather gloomy. He was not a robust child and his aunt “instructed me to compose myself in sleep, with a temper as if I were never again to wake in this sublunary world.” [“Auto-biography,” in Collected Novels and Memoirs (CNM), 1992, I, 12.] At five he was reading The Pilgrim’s Progress with her, together with James Janeway’s Account of the Conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children (1671–2), and hymns, catechisms and prayers written by Dr. Isaac Watts. One of Godwin’s earliest memories was of composing a poem entitled ‘I wish to be a minister’ (CNM I, 15), and a favourite childhood entertainment was to preach sermons in the kitchen on Sunday afternoons.⁵

His mother was warmer, his father colder, and a succession of deeply religious teachers—a Mrs. Gedge, followed by a Mr. Akers who ran a school Godwin attended—apparently insured that Godwin’s religious enthusiasms never flagged; he in due course went off to prepare for the ministry with one Samuel Newton, minister of an independent congregation in Norwich, who was under the influence of the strange, very extreme Calvinist Robert Sandeman (1718–1771). Like Godwin’s father and grandfather, Sandeman also held that redemption was a matter not of faith or good works, but of right judgment, and he found even most Calvinists deficient in this department. Godwin came to detest Newton for his cruelty and use of caning, leaving him in mid-1770 to go off to become a bookseller before finding his way to the more liberal Hoxton Academy. But the core Sandemanian outlook remained with him in some form all of his life, an outlook that enjoined, on New Testament grounds, not only the rational apprehension of the truth, but also brotherly love, the sharing of wealth, and the equality of the sexes. The right judgment of the individual, truth perceived and proclaimed, so dear to his father, grandfather, and to the Sandemanians, was Godwin’s North Star from the beginning of his voyage through to its end. But there was a constellation around it of other points of belief fixed at an early age. As Peter Marshall notes:

On leaving Newton’s intellectual and emotional hothouse, Godwin entered at the age of seventeen the Dissenting Academy at Hoxton, one of the best centres of higher education in eighteenth-century England. Godwin received here a thorough grounding in Locke’s psychology which saw the mind as a blank sheet, in Newtonian sciences which pictured the universe as a machine governed by natural laws, and in Hutcheson’s ethics which upheld benevolence and utility as the cornerstones of virtue. The academy was extremely favourable to free enquiry, and Godwin formed in his own time a belief in determinism, or in the philosophical language of the day, ‘necessity’ … and in idealism or ‘immaterialism’ (i.e. the external world is created by the mind). These beliefs subsequently underwent no fundamental change. … Godwin was a Tory and a Sandemanian when he entered Hoxton Academy. Being cautious about accepting new ideas and fearful of eternal punishment, he left five years later with his beliefs intact.⁶

Following in the family tradition, and despite his father’s warnings about his excessive pride as a child, Godwin, still set on becoming a minister, failed to find a congenial congregation: “Three times he tried to become a minister, and three times he was rejected by rural congregations. They no doubt disliked his learned sermons and pricklish manner.”⁷ Thanks to those rural congregations, to the ferment of the times, and to a well-read artisan tradesman, Godwin would in the end lose his Calvinism and Tory conservatism and embark on the unsteady career of a writer. At age 26, while waiting for one of his congregations to reject him,

[a]n artisan put into his hands the works of D’Holbach, Helvetius and Rousseau, the most subversive philosophers of the French Enlightenment whose banned works were causing an uproar on the other side of the Channel. … Godwin read in Rousseau that man is naturally good but corrupted by institutions, that the foundation of private property was the beginning of the downfall of humanity, and that man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. From Helvetius and D’Holbach, he learned that all men are equal and society should be formed for human happiness. When he closed the covers of their books, his whole world view had changed.⁸

The artisan tradesman in question, to whom history owes a great debt, was Frederick Norman, and his timely reading list added to other forces in Godwin’s life—his growing sympathies for the Whigs during the controversies over the American Revolution, and an enhanced appreciation for Roman historians and Jonathan Swift that conduced to republicanism—to produce a remarkable conversion, both to the views of Socinus, who denied Christ’s divinity and the doctrine of original sin, and to a much needed change in career aspirations. Godwin moved to London, hoping to make it as a writer and teacher.

Success did not come quickly, to put it mildly. In 1783 he published a remarkably progressive tract, An Account of the Seminary, which was a prospectus for a school that he intended to open in Epsom, one that would offer a wide range of foreign and classical language instruction for a small cohort of pupils. For Godwin, “our moral dispositions and character depend very much, perhaps entirely, upon education.”⁹ The plan was excellent, but not the recruitment: no students showed up.

But Godwin did write at a furious pace, producing his first book (a life of the Tory politician William Pitt), lots of pamphlets on behalf of the Whig cause, and a string of forgettable novels. He was, to a considerable degree, doing political reporting for the Dissenting community through his contributions to the New Annual Register, journalistic work that paid the bills. Perhaps most interestingly, a selection of his sermons, the 1784 Sketches of History, shows him softening to the views of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. For Godwin, it was understandable that Satan should rebel against such a tyrannical God, and after his fall continue to rebel, because, as Godwin put it in Political Justice, “he saw no sufficient reason for that extreme inequality of rank and power which the creator assumed.” Having reached such a juncture, his next step was scarcely surprising: “His friendship with the radical playwright Thomas Holcroft further persuaded him to become an atheist and confirmed the evils of marriage and government.”¹⁰ Although Godwin did not remain an out-and-out atheist for long, he neither returned to genuine religious orthodoxy nor to belief in a personal God, but only to a form of cosmic op...